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Leslie Burkholder
Consider the plight of Pimli College’s Computing Advisory Committee. (Pimli is, of course, a fictitious college. It is a middle-size private college with a middle-size reputation, located somewhere to the east or west or north or south of here.) There have been several incidents of computer abuse on campus. Computing staff have been reading other people’s electronic mail. Students have been experimenting with computer viruses on public cluster machines. Faculty have been copying licensed software for use at home. As a consequence, the committee has been asked by the head of Academic Computing to do something. His suggestion is that the college should have a Code of Computer Ethics, a set of standards regarding the proper use of its computing facilities. Is this a good idea? Where do they begin? What topics should they include? Should they do something else besides writing up a code? Indeed, should they even bother to struggle with composing such a code at all?
Sensibly enough, the committee asks first questions
first. Why, committee members ask one another and the head of Academic
Computing, should we have a computer ethics code? What is it supposed
to do?
One answer the committee gets, from the head of Academic Computing, is
that it will encourage reasonable behavior with computers on campus. It
will reduce, though it won’t guarantee to eliminate, computer abuse.
Of course, he says, it will have to be put into student, staff, and faculty
handbooks to have that effect. Perhaps it will have to be distributed
or lectured on at orientation sessions for new members of the college
community. Perhaps everyone will even be asked to sign a statement saying
that they have read and agree to abide by the code. But improved
ethical behavior is what the head of Academic Computing plans to
get from the code. (The response is not unique to computer misuse, of
course. An informal survey at Carnegie Mellon University recently uncovered
lots of cheating on exams and class assignments. One response was: institute
an Honor Code, it will reduce the incidence of these events. (The
Tartan, 29 April 1991.)
Committee members, some of them skeptical scientists,
wonder: How will a code do this? In fact, is there any evidence that codes
do this sort of improving thing?
So the head of Academic Computing elaborates. People
may misuse campus computing facilities because they know no better or
because they aren’t motivated to do better. The code, he says, will
either make members of the campus community more knowledgeable or more
motivated.
Sometimes people do wrong because they haven’t
realized that certain activities are wrong and harmful. Perhaps staff
read other people’s electronic mail because it is so easy to do that
it is hard to realize that it’s wrong. In that case, the code can,
as the jargon has it, raise their consciousness or awareness. Sometimes
people are puzzled about what the right course of action is. May a researcher,
for example, look at files recording a student’s revisions of his
essays, without that student’s permission, in order to complete a
study of how a writing tool is used? The code can, at least sometimes,
provide the answer and so put the puzzled person on the right path.
Sometimes people know, for example, that copying licensed
software or reading another’s files is thought to be wrong. Sometimes
they are even pretty sure in their own minds that these are wrong. But
like someone who is pretty sure that eating that pint of Ben & Jerry’s
ice cream is not really the best of things to do, temptation can win.
A code, especially a code with punishment for violations, says the head
of Academic Computing, can provide an extra boost of motivation to do
what’s right.
In addition, he points out, disciplining people for
computer abuse without an explicit code or other warning can itself sometimes
be wrong. What people, especially students, often are heard to say when
disciplined is, “No one told us we shouldn’t do it. No one told
us we would be punished. No one bothered us about it before.” If
so, how can they be justly disciplined? Of course, the reasoning here
may sometimes be a little suspect. A person is excused from punishment
if he can sensibly have thought his actions were innocent of wrongdoing.
If you find yourself at a software vendor’s booth at a computer show,
in front of what all the signs suggest is a stack of free demo disks,
no one can complain if you help yourself. But can it really be true of
students or faculty or others who copy licensed software for home use
that they have no reasons to think it a bad act? On the other hand, at
least if it’s said in the college computer ethics code that it’s
wrong and punishable, then the excuse of innocent ignorance is unavailable.
By now, other members of the committee have thought
of reasons for having a code.
One member, a user consultant who spends her time
out in the clusters, has thought of a dark reason. Sometimes, she says,
people know what’s right and would like to do it. They are not tempted
by their own independent desires to do wrong. What happens is that they
are pressured by their superiors or circumstances to do wrong. We all
hear about this sort of thing in industry, she says, but it happens in
schools and universities too. A student assistant is told by a professor
to look through computer files the professor hasn’t permission to
look through. The new and nervous manager of computer clusters is told
to make sure that there are sufficient copies of a statistics package
but is not given a big enough budget to achieve this. Even if these people
would like to do what’s right, can they resist the pressure that
might be put on them to do something that’s wrong? Perhaps, she hazards,
a code can help. They can point to its provisions when refusing to comply
with such requests.
The software acquisitions manager and the college’s
legal counsel jump in. The software acquisitions manager says she thinks
it would be easier to work with software vendors, could she give them
some assurance that their software wasn’t being pirated. She believes
the college’s adoption of a code, with appropriate discipline for
illegal software copying, would help. At least, she says, it would show
them that Something Is Being Done. The college’s lawyer is worried
about liability matters (cf Johnson, Olson, and Post, 1989). While he
can’t predict what might happen with certainty, he is worried that
a software company might sue for illegal software copying or that a business
or private individual might sue for damages caused by a loosed computer
virus started on campus or for damages caused to files by student hackers
snooping from campus machines. In any of these cases, he says, the courts
might treat a member of staff or faculty or even a student as an agent
of the college, as someone acting with its permission. The lawyers then
would go after the college because it has deeper pockets. Having a code
might help protect the college. He, the college’s lawyer, could argue
in court that it had taken precautions against just such actions by its
members. The computer abusers were not acting as agents of the college
and so, whatever their personal prospects, the college itself shouldn’t
be held liable.
Perhaps, says one of the skeptical scientists on the
committee, what the software acquisitions manager and the college’s
lawyer say are true. No doubt they have the knowledge and experience to
judge. The head of Academic Computing certainly has a nice theory about
the benefits of a code. The user consultant certainly tells a terrible
tale. But will a code help? Does anybody know whether it will have the
good effects claimed for it?
A business ethics professor has an answer. Many businesses
have codes of conduct, he explains. Lots of companies adopt them after
misconduct by employees at various levels is uncovered (Lee, 1986). Do
they have a good effect? Do they reduce misconduct? Well, he says, there
are lots of testimonials by High Company Officials that they do. But these
aren’t really worth much more as proof of their effect than testimonials
from famous athletes about the benefits of breakfast cereals or training
shoes. There is the case of the bribery scandals in the ’70s. Lots
of US companies, after they were discovered to have been bribing government
officials in foreign countries for one reason or another, adopted codes
forbidding bribes. Bribing incidence fell. Did the codes cause that? Maybe,
but too much else was going on, government action on bribery and a public
outcry, for example, to tell.
On the other hand, he says, there is something pretty
solid. Two professors ran some experiments at about the time of the ’70s
bribery scandals (Hegarty and Sims, 1979). They wanted to determine, among
other things, the effect of ethics codes on willingness to use bribes.
The subjects were business school students. They were divided into two
comparable groups. Members of both groups were to act as sales managers
for a company. Both were told that bribes would increase business. One
group was told that unethical behavior was against company policy. And
the researchers were reasonably sure, from prior questioning, that all
their subjects thought it wrong, unethical, to give bribes. The group
told that unethical behavior was against company policy bribed less.
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